avstraliitski

"CVS should be enough for everyone" ;)

Firstly, you originally posted this article so I can see that you are biased against cynical dismissal of the company. (I tend to feel that in openness you should have declared that in refuting my skeptical take on Evernote, but now I've done it for you.)

Secondly, it seems from your background that you are 18 and your self-identity is closely linked to programming 'apps' and the whole money-for-dotbubbleapp2.0 thang. I am happy for your (apparent?) success thus far, as you yourself spin it. However, I would suggest that you consider that perhaps you do not have enough perspective yet to understand that this whole thing is just a game... a very stupid game... and ultimately not necessarily producing anything at all that is meaningful or useful to humanity, the economy, the country, or your dog: despite big scary amounts of money being thrown around.

In answer to your question: I am serious. It appears to me that it is not untrue to say that nothing Evernote has done has actually been new or unique. All they've done is drawn a cloud around some stuff that existed before (I can hear the squeak of the whiteboard marker right now...), put some marketing dollars down and made some sexed-up UI's for a few device types. That's it.

Then got a bunch of money.

Of course, they probably wasted a lot more money doing it less efficiently ... and used a lot of stupid Silly-valley oldboy networks to get the cash ... and burned a lot of time. And maybe actually did produce something new along the way. But basically... nothing new. Skepticism is king.

TL;DR? That's sad because I can't them recommend that you try The Art of UNIX Programming or any tome on code generation. But I hope you do. Also, take a tip and don't aim for fame "One day I hope you won't need to look me up to find out who I am" (puh-lease!) ... we were all 18 once.

I am going to have to stop replying to these comments soon because they're not well thought out. But here's another response.

More than text files? Yes, there's some binary file support too. "Ooh"

OCR is not hard. They probably just use http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/

The fact that they don't have 'competition' proves nothing. Maybe nobody wants their 'product' because it's not useful. As others have commented even here, who've actually tried to "get it" multiple times, it's really not useful for a lot of people - they just don't see the point.

Maybe the lack of people copying their "product" is because it's just marketing fluff around a solution to a problem that doesn't exist (really, very much, for most people, apparently).

I agree. However, In my worldview, due to life being short one should eventually learn to think past value as presently defined by the US market, because the cracks in that particular form of economic rationalism have grown far too great to hide.

J. Krishnamurti: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

Why would you replicate something that already exists? That's what Evernote has done, with very minimal spin. It's pretty close to empty marketing crud.

A superior solution would be any version control client and regular files. I'm not intimately familiar with Evernote but I'd wager that there are at least ten major features of good version control systems that Evernote doesn't have. Features like decentralisation, transparency, open source, mature security model, mature fork and merge model, commit hooks, etc.

Failing that, even rsync would be a good solution for a single user. I'm sure it's probably more on-wire efficient than whatever system Evernote use.

In reality, economics is not about money.

If you produce resources or services of value, then the future is rosier because others will trade with you in exchange for access to those resources or services.

If you make some piece of software junk that's dismally easy to copy and do so based on speculative capital, particularly when it provides arguably zero unique value, then what you've done is wasted everyone's time... including that of your own workforce. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evernote#Similar_products_and_s...

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is rife in the US.

Back to reality: I cannot conceive of China suddenly sending squillions of RMB to the US because someone figured out how to Web2.0 a TODO text file. Hence, skepticism on real economic value.

Honestly, I've coded loads in perl, and I think the language has a great place in the Unix user's toolkit. I certainly use it for small scripts all the time. However, the 10,000th time I had to type 'man perldsc' because of the ugly hack that perl data structures and their syntax represent ("Access and printing of HoHoAoHoHoAoA", anyone?), I swore never to use it for complex projects. I learned PHP, and never looked back. Do yourself a favour and learn Ruby, Python or PHP. Don't use perl for complex web projects - it's simply not the problem domain it was designed for, and it shows. I mean, look at the code example on that framework's page: "my $self = shift;" .. who can be bothered with such cruft in 2011? Get with the program!

I disagree strongly with the article's premise. Don't take a job where a language and framework has been chosen that you don't know, where you are still at the point where building basic websites is a 'project'. Why not? Because obviously the company you are working for has no idea what they are doing with their time and money, and you're therefore unlikely to be in an environment with skilled coworkers.

If you are really a beginning web developer, read the HTTP RFC. Learn HTML. Learn Javascript. Learn CSS. Learn basic Unix. Pick one simple project and implement it in three different languages. Then implement it with three different database layers. Then implement it with three different web servers. Then implement it on three different operating systems or at least Linux distributions.

Now try to benchmark and scale. Compare multiple front end load balancers. Compare various NoSQL database architectures and caching solutions. Try some cloud hosting, see where it falls down.

This will teach you far more than fiddling in one framework.

+1! The only IT people worth their salt are those who have natural curiosity. Without it, you cannot sustain learning as technology evolves and the industry changes, and your skills will become irrelevant. Incidentally, this is probably why a lot of formally trained CS / software engineering grads actually suck. They never put 2+2 together for themselves, out of interest, in their own time, for fun.

The simple fact is that many people need drugs to deal with day to day living in US society. They are told constantly they should be happy, healthy, beautiful, hard working. The US has less holidays than other western nations. It also has less international news and arguably a more homogenous media culture. For many of these people, if they can take a pill and not worry, then they will do so. It's shocking to a non US citizen how much drug advertising is on American television. Ask any foreigner - they have all noticed. It's the sort of thing that would be outlawed in other countries. Particularly the wording - "ask your doctor for ...". On the other hand, natural drugs with proven benefits (I believe a recent magic mushroom study just strongly suggested that they keep people happy for a year after dosage) are outlawed. THX, anyone? sigh

So you essentially Web2.0 a TODO text file, making s/CRLF/<arbitrary new record type>/ and let some other people view it, maybe ... add timestamping or version control or some other cruft, maybe a couple of mobile platform specific interfaces and/or an API (whole thing <1 weekend coding, add 2 weeks for UI/UX) ... somehow con fools in to using it, then someone gives you 50 million USD. This is why the US economy is going down the drain. Unbelievable.

It's almost never the wrong decision to try something new.

I liked WebOS and was enthused by the launch. I wanted to buy a device. I was in Taiwan, one of the world's consumer electronics centers. There were no devices. FAIL.

If you can't even distribute your product, then why bother building it? Seems like they spent so many years / so much money on R&D that their marketing failed.

I'm sorry but a forced-smile charismatic keynote (and that's being generous), even a very well presented one, cannot make up for the lack of global distribution. The US is not relevant as a leading consumer electronics market anymore. You need to either be global, or go to Asia.

This is lame and not HN-worthy because the use cases are almost zero.

0. Premature optimisation is the root of all evil 1. Approximately zero big sites use ruby 2. Of large sites, very few would actually care that much about tiny on-wire messaging optimisation since other elements are far more significant to bandwidth use. 3. On-wire messaging in binary destroys transparency, which means PITA debugging and wasted programmer and API-using developer time. Programmer time is far more important than computer time or a few bytes of bandwidth in most developed nations. 4. You have to pay for the binary serialisation with additional client-side code, which means you've actually gone backwards until you've communicated enough that the delta between JSON and binary format message sizes have outgrown this initial load time penalty. 5. Initial load time penalties are often more important than subsequent use, since generally this is the only time client bandwidth (the only side of the bandwidth equation relevant to performance in 99.99% of cases) is going to be challenged to any serious level. 6. Refer to point zero.

G+'s manageable exposure model may threaten the whole online dating arena when opt-in interest groups (Facebook 'page' replacements, possibly co-branded with Google Groups) with geolocation support and event functionality (possibly co-branded with Google Calendar) happen. Discuss.

I posted the same request. I run a Facebook page for a small special-interest community with a few hundred members. Members can meet each other, share relevant info, and there's some people with powers to moderate the inevitable borderline-commercial crap that pops up rarely. G+ doesn't have this.

Maybe Google Groups + G+ can have babies and make a superior opt-in, shared-community solution to Facebook pages.

The thing is, from Google's marketing perspective, this is also similar to LinkedIn and .. well .. it would just look way too much like "more of the same" for them to push it hard at launch. But the demand's clearly there, I think we'll see it added.

Don't worry about DECE. I had access to draft technical documentation on it about .. oh .. early 2009.

I don't think it's breaking any NDA to discuss the overall aspects of the consortium's goals.

Basically what they are trying to do is produce a global network of secure digital content distribution servers. Under their model, all digital content retailers actually sell access to this single global commercial content delivery infrastructure.

However, it remains unclear to me under the proposed model: a) Who will pay for the servers b) Which devices will or will not be supported, and how media transcoding (to support differing device capabilities) will be handled c) Who the user complains to if they can't get access to the content they paid for d) What value retailers would add in such a scenario - indeed, how they would 'compete' with each other given very little control and thus capability for unique product offering

Like many dreamy consortia, I see this one as dead in the water. The technical problems are significant, and there is a general lack of impetus to actually get out there are solve the problems.

A DRM industry for plain media (consume only, non-interactive) that dreams of securing global distribution is, in my view, destined to self-flagellate until it is but a poor faded memory in the distant mists of time.

On the other hand, DRM can enable good consumer experience: I really like Steam, for example. I recently bought my first Mac and many of the games I'd purchased on PC instantly became available in my library. After just logging in, I could download them for the new platform and play away instantly... even though I'd changed countries and gaming platforms. This is what DRM should be doing: empowering people to mobility and choice through connected media. Steam just does so many things right: content discovery, supporting smaller and independent content developers, social elements.

I think the entire DRM industry should look up to Steam for a successful example of the future. Bottom line: THINK OF THE CUSTOMER.

I worked on a project recently where they gave $10 million USD to convince a major consumer electronics manufacturer to use a Microsoft software component in an upcoming product. This is apparently standard practice for them.

Microsoft is essentially a marketing business with a huge amount of capital: not a software company.

Nice. I am in Kerala right now! The vegetarian food here is amazing :)

Fundamental truth = no code should ever trust its input. Break this rule never. If you have optimization problems, then don't worry because they're better than security problems and the hardware will likely solve it for you by the time you release. Trust relationships between bits of any codebase mean 'not loose coupled' = fundamental design flaw for simple, maintainable and secure code. Unix design philosophy: "do one thing and do it well" (and that means checking all your input religiously for every function)

I found one of these and notified the IT manager of the company. It wasn't hard to get them on the phone. Then I got free stuff and many thanks in return, plus warm fuzzies.

Tablets are good for restaurants, stock taking and other specialised uses. Though they will soon fight the connected TV in the lounge room, right now they are a good option to have about the house if you just want to read or browse and remain mobile. Depending upon how their price and applications develop (very much in flux right now, it seems) against other platforms (PC, mobile, connected TV) I expect we'll see a leveling out in tablet growth. One thing's apparently for sure: they've killed the underpowered 'netbook' concept (finally).

Communications: Never communicate more than once under the same identity. Do not use a cell phone. Borrow other people's phones, Skype, or use public phones if you need to make or receive a call. Never communicate with anyone whose inbound calls may be monitored. Use one time pad encryption where possible. Otherwise, fall back to public/private key.

Finance: Cash is king. Use prepaid disposable credit cards or stolen credit cards if you need to make a credit card transaction. If you have access, use an informal exchange system such as the much famed Islamic system. To move money internationally, buy and sell expensive items such as art or jewellery that you can carry on your person as you travel.

Travel: Boats still seem a very good option for international movement across oceans. If no ocean is involved, catch public transport that does not require leaving your identity and movements on databases (eg: unreserved trains, buses). Stolen vehicles are preferable to registered ones, obviously.

Other: You can also assume other people's identities by stealing their identity papers/other documents. It seems these days this is getting much harder as 'identity theft' countermeasures are put in place.

Two words: fuck bureaucracy.

This is why I'll never work for a large company.

I may have a job offer for you, send me your email address (only, the receive inbox is effectively public): avstraliitski@TempEmail.net

I'm guessing your male. If you were female I'd help you out! Bureaucracy sux. Good luck.

Furthermore I would add that there is no 'magic deploy to cloud' button that is going to work most of the time for most people. As much as the RoR fans would love to think so :)

./generate code && tweak-slightly && deploy-reliably && lunch-on-profits # not gonna happen anytime soon for complex systems

I think the rapid adoption of these first generation cloud type services is basically something that introduces massive inefficiencies and unknowns in to any system.

Simply put, no SLA - even with cash penalties attached - really means anything: you actually have to know the capabilities and specs of your system, its power, cooling and other physical environmental inputs, plus the engineered capacities for live failover on all levels before you can calculate or claim reliability. Anything else is just kidding yourself. A lot of people kid themselves.

Anyone want to meet sooner? I'm recently freed of employment and trying to figure out what the tech scene's like around here (other than linked to 'the industry'...)

May is ages, I might throw the towel in and go travel India or move to SF or something before then :) Would prefer to stay though! Looking out over San Fernando valley now .. listening to lovely music, typing on new laptop and preparing to go and celebrate the traditional long weekend holiday that commemorates my nations' deaths in Turkey during the war...

sigh

May as well have a party! Hell, have it at my place!

At age 19 I quit my burgeoning career after a similar realisation in India, where I had been sent to present a satellite surveillance solution to their military. Similar trips followed to other asian governments, R&D on surveillance systems for national police, etc. I quit instead of take the dirty money. Some people are happy to do that, but I always make sure what I work these days on can only be used for good or is relatively harmless at worst.